GCPH Seminar Series 11: Lecture 3 - Dr Marilyn Waring
The Economics of Dignity
Marilyn Waring has spent the last 25 years working to empower women and men to challenge the priorities that mainstream economists impose on them. A public policy researcher well known for her research on the value of unpaid work her book: Counting for Nothing: what men value and what women are worth has had world wide impact. Her extensive body of research is internationally respected, and has spanned political economy, governance and public policy, gender analysis and human rights.
Her views about what should be done have evolved over time. She no longer believes that we should put monetary values on unpaid work and the environment. Instead she has developed a human rights approach that puts women and other vulnerable people at the centre asking: what would make women’s lives easier, safer and freer and what would make women more valued, productive, have more life opportunities, have more power?
All Professor Waring’s work springs from the communities in New Zealand where she grew up, the different concepts of value that she learned and the extraordinary environment which she and others are still battling to preserve against exploitation.
In this talk Professor Waring set out her current thinking around what she has called the Economics of Dignity.
Read a related blog A peoples-led outcomes approach: Integrating capabilities and human rights into outcomes by Francis Stuart.
About the speaker
Prof Marilyn Waring, Professor of Public Policy, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
Professor Waring received her PhD in Political Economy from the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She is an author, scholar, environmentalist and social justice activist. She was elected to the New Zealand parliament at the age of 23 and served 3 terms, chairing the Public Expenditure Committee from 1979 – 1984. Her distinguished career includes acting as an advisor to numerous organisations not least the United Nations and in 2003 she was appointed to the Board of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. She is also the winner of numerous honours and awards including the Amnesty International New Zealand Human Right’s Defender Award in 2013 and the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research Economics Award in 2014. In a recent anthology, Counting on Marilyn Waring: New Advances in Feminist Economics, edited by Margunn Bjornholt and Ailsa McKay, 31 authors from nine countries outline the wide ranging impact and resonance of Professor Waring’s work as well as the current frontiers of feminist economics.
Resources
Back to